• Source: Pssst

Pssst is an action video game developed and published by Ultimate Play the Game that was released for the ZX Spectrum in June 1983. In the game, Robbie the Robot has to protect his plant (a Thyrgodian Megga Chrisanthodil) as it is attacked by various insects, each of which needs a different repellent to neutralise it. Pssst was the second game to be released by Ultimate, after Jetpac.
The game was written by Chris Stamper and graphics were designed by his brother, Tim Stamper. Pssst was one of the very few Spectrum games also available in ROM format for use with the Interface 2, allowing "instantaneous" loading of the game (the normal method of cassette loading could take several minutes). The game received positive reviews from two publications upon release, with critics mainly praising its presentation and gameplay.




Gameplay



The game is presented from a single, 2D perspective, and revolves around Robbie the Robot's objective to defend his plant from interstellar space slugs, leeches and midges. The plant grows from the bottom centre of the screen, and spray cans containing three different pesticides are located on ledges on each side of the screen. Bonus items such as fertiliser and fly swatters appear on unoccupied ledges which will increase both the players score and the plant's growth rate.
There are three types of coloured parasite, and three types of pesticide, which will either kill, stun, or have no effect on the parasites. The player can only carry one type of pesticide at a time; during the early stages of the game the lethal pesticide can be carried at all times, but later stages have more than one type of parasite on screen at once, making the choice of pesticide more tactical.
As the plant grows it may sprout leaves; these increase the growth rate but also vulnerability to the parasites. Once the plant reaches a predetermined height it flowers and the player advances to the next level. A life will be deducted whenever the plant dies or the player makes contact with a parasite.




Development


Pssst is one of the few Spectrum games also available in ROM format for use with the Interface 2, allowing instantaneous loading of the game when the normal method of cassette loading could take several minutes. The game used the common technique of sprites and allowing them to be placed atop each other, which often overlapped colours on the screen causing attribute clash. Pssst was also able to run on the 16K version of the Spectrum.




Reception



Paul Liptrot of Home Computing Weekly praised the graphics, stating them as overall "smooth-moving" and colourful, as well as praising the "addictive" gameplay. ZX Computing considered the game as very professionally written and produced, with excellently smooth and detailed graphics. In addition, the review stated originality, addictivity and enjoyability of Pssst.
Pssst reached number 10 in the MRIB Top 30 software charts in July 1983 while Jetpac was still at number 1. In the fourth issue of Personal Computer Games, Pssst was nominated for a 1983 game of the year list on account of Ultimate's "famous graphics". According to the reviewer, other attributes of the game included its "originality" and "fun" in comparison to other Ultimate titles that were released in 1983. In a retrospective review, a reviewer of Retro Games! Now summarised that the game "was not the best" of Ultimate's releases for the ZX Spectrum, despite considering it to be "less lauded" than the others. However, they considered Pssst to be a "taste of things to come" and a significant improvement over the "clunky" and "jumpy" animation of previous games for the ZX Spectrum.




References






External links


Pssst at SpectrumComputing.co.uk
• Source: Pssst!

Pssst! (styled as pssst!) was a short-lived British comics magazine published by Never–Artpool in 1982. Pssst!, which lasted ten monthly issues, was an attempt to publish a British equivalent of the lavish French bande dessinée magazines.
Bryan Talbot, Glenn Dakin, Shaky Kane, Paul Johnson, Stephen Baskerville, Ed Pinsent, John Watkiss, John Bolton, John Higgins, and Angus McKie were amongst the many cartoonists published within the pages of pssst!. Early parts of Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright were published in the comic.
Talbot feels that pssst! "...was the precursor of Escape and Deadline and the rest of the cascade of British adult comic mags that came out in the Eighties and Nineties." Critic Russell Willis, on the other hand, wrote of the publication, "It tended towards Heavy Metal tits, ass and girls-with-butterfly-wings style over any lasting substance."




Overview


Early in his career, British comics expert Paul Gravett worked for pssst!; he described his experiences on his website:

Pssst! ... was the misguided dream of a delightfully wacky and wealthy French couple, Serge and Henriette Boissevain, who were convinced that a British attempt at the sort of luxurious 'adult' bande dessinée magazine that sold in France would make a fortune here; instead, it nearly lost them theirs.
I had started at pssst! late in 1981 as their promotions man, touring England in the middle of winter ... on a double-decker London bus. Outside, its side windows were covered and painted with wild cartoon graphics, while inside, the seats downstairs had been removed to make a shop, and the seats upstairs were kept to form a cinema screening a back-projected, sound-and-light comics slideshow, for adults only.
On the road, one of my duties was to seek out new artists and we found more than we could imagine. One discovery when we hit Manchester's art college was curly-haired student Glenn Dakin, whose devilish cartooning on Temptation quickly made it into pssst! magazine.
In the end, after being hounded out of town by irate council officials and scraping ice off the inside of the windows (thankfully we never had to sleep on the bus), it was a relief to be taken off the road for good.

I got an ideal job back at the offices as traffic manager, coordinating artwork and interviewing potential contributors. There was a buzz to opening each day's submissions and presenting them to the weekly editorial meetings. I got to see loads of art and artists and I learnt a lot about magazines, both what to do and what not.




Publication history


Pssst! was produced by a division of Never Limited called Artpool Limited, owned by Serge Boissevain and Henriette Bentinck Boissevain. The company was based in London, at 38 Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell. Psssst was distributed by Seymour Press Ltd. In late 1981, Paul Gravett left his role as manager of Fast Fiction — a stall at the bimonthly Westminster Comics Mart which sold bande dessinée — to work as promotions manager for pssst!.
According to Talbot, each issue was about "fifty pages, printed on top quality glossy paper and with the highest production values."
Early parts of Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright were published in pssst! (the first parts having been published in the British underground comic Near Myths in 1978–1980). Talbot "reworked the chapters that [he'd] already done for Near Myths but by around issue five or six [he] was drawing new ones."
Grant Morrison and Tony O'Donnell went to London for a meeting with pssst!'s publishers, who said they wanted to publish Morrison's Gideon Stargrave stories as well as some of their other work. Morrison said, "I'd done a new Gideon Stargrave story... it's my favourite one I've ever done in my life and it's never been seen anywhere." Pssst!, however, was canceled before it was published, leading Morrison to "feel that [he] was some kind of albatross".
Talbot's Arkwright storyline, less than half complete, was interrupted again when pssst! was canceled in 1982.
As Gravett writes, "Put together by committee, pssst! was a camel of a magazine, which was forced to close after ten issues.




Legacy


In 1983, Gravett and Peter Stanbury formed Escape magazine, with a mandate similar to that of pssst!, and which lasted until the end of the 1980s.
As he shut down pssst!, publisher Serge Boissevain collected all of Talbot's Luther Arkwright stories — including the material from Near Myths — in the trade paperback (TPB) The Adventures of Luther Arkwright Book 1: Rat Trap. Thanks to Valkyrie Press, between 1987 and 1989 Talbot completed the story, which was published as a series of nine standard comic books. In 1987, Boissevain paid for the printing of the Valkyrie Press TPB, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright Book 2: Transfiguration. And then, in 1989, under the publisher name Proutt, Boissevain published the final Luther Arkwright TPB, Book 3: Götterdämmerung.




References






External links


pssst! at the Grand Comics Database

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Phil Elliott
• Penghargaan Joystick Emas
• Pssst
• Pssst!
• Ultimate Play the Game
• Chocolate Puma
• Escape (magazine)
• Your Sinclair
• Ezra Jack Keats
• The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
• Cookie (video game)
• Golden Joystick Awards